Embodiments described herein relate generally to telecommunications switch fabrics and more particularly to control planes within switch fabrics.
Switch fabrics can be used, for example, to route data between multiple network devices and/or storage devices. Each network device and/or storage device can be operatively coupled to the switch fabric and can control data input to and output from the switch fabric. In this manner, each network device and/or storage device can send data to the switch fabric and receive data from the switch fabric.
Control processors can be used to monitor and/or control the operation of the switch fabric. For example, a control processor can be used to maintain and/or distribute a routing table to modules within the various stages of the switch fabric and/or the network devices and/or storage devices configured to interface with the switch fabric. Such a routing table can contain information indicating where each module within the switch fabric, the network devices and/or the storage devices should forward the data such that the data reaches its destination. For example, the routing table can indicate to which module within a second stage of a switch fabric a module within a first stage of the switch fabric should send a particular data packet to.
The control processor can be electrically and physically coupled to each module within the switch fabric and/or each access switch by multiple cables. If the switch fabric contains a large number of modules and/or if a large number of network devices and/or storage devices are configured to send data to the switch fabric, a large number of cables are typically used. This is in addition to the cables used to send data within the switch fabric. Thus, the number of cables used in the system can be relatively large and potentially unmanageable.
Additionally, if the control signals are sent via cables separate from the cables used to send the data signals, data signals can still be sent even if the control signal becomes inoperable. This can be undesirable because the data is sent without having anything controlling and/or monitoring to where the data is sent.
Thus, a need exists for a switch fabric system having a relatively few number of physical connections between a control processor and the modules within the switch fabric and/or the access switches. Additionally, a switch fabric system where data will not be sent if the control connections become inoperable, would be advantageous.